Today I have the pleasure to announce that Marble is the first popular virtual globe that ships and visualizes the Behaim Globe. The Behaim Globe is the oldest surviving terrestrial globe on earth. It was created between 1492 and 1493 - yes at the same time when Christopher Columbus made his first voyage towards the west and "discovered" America.

Many pre-university students have participated in Google Code-In (2014) again and for many of them it has been the first opportunity to make contributions to Free Software and Open Source projects. In opposite to Google Summer of Code the GCI program is organized as a worldwide contest where students at the age of 13-17 years take the challenge to complete as many software development tasks from their mentor organizations as possible.

Google Summer of Code application deadline is just a bit more than 24 hours away and we are still looking for highly motivated students to work on a Marble Virtual Globe project this summer. Tomorrow is a holiday in many countries, so you might still have some time for the application. Make sure you file your application not later than tomorrow at 19:00 UTC.

Google Summer of Code application deadline is near and we are still looking for highly motivated students to work on a Marble Virtual Globe project this summer.

This is a follow-up of yesterday's blog about OpenStreetMap vector rendering with tiling support.

Google Summer of Code application deadline is near and we are still looking for highly motivated students to work on a Marble Virtual Globe project this summer.

One of our favorite topics is "OpenStreetMap vector rendering with tiling support". And in this blog I'd like to describe our current ideas about this interesting subject a bit more in detail:

The European Space Agency is organizing ESA Summer of Code in Space 2011. And Marble and KStars have just been accepted as mentor organizations! Thanks a lot ESA, this is terrific news!

The students application period starts today! And the schedule is tight: The deadline for applications is on July 27th, 11:00 AM (UTC) - that's about in a week!

So if you're a student and if you'd like to participate then please hurry up and

• check the FAQ - especially the paragraph about eligibility
• pick a project from the ideas page (or suggest your own project)
• fill out and submit the application form for students.

If you have any question, you can refer to the documentation center or write to the public SOCIS mailing list.

If you have a question regarding Marble or KStars ideas just ask on our mailing lists ([email protected] and [email protected]).

And remember: In space no one can hear you code.

Have you considered contributing to the Marble (Virtual Globe) yet? The Voice of Marble contest is about to end in 8 days, so you could make use of your weekend by contributing:

The new year 2011 has just started and it looks very, very promising for Marble: According to the Release Schedule "KDE Software Compilation (SC) 4.6" will get released with Marble 1.0 in about two weeks. This will be an exciting release which will introduce largely extended worldwide Routing support (Online and Offline), Bookmarks, QML bindings for libMarble, official support for the Nokia N900 / Maemo platform and too many other things to mention!

With our usual release cycle the next big milestone would be Marble 1.2 which will be released together with KDE SC 4.7 (Summer 2011). We have hopes that this might introduce the first steps towards an OpenGL mode for Marble and lots of other bigger framework changes.

For all Marble addicts we have even better news: Google Code-In has just been successfully completed and the students who focussed on Marble tasks did some marbleous, amazing work! Utku Aydın for example created some great new functionality for Marble:

• An Earthquake plugin which visualizes earthquakes in realtime via geonames.org
• A Social Contacts plugin which uses OpenDesktop.org to display your friends on the Marble globe.
• And a Map Creation Wizard that allows you to create your own maps (e.g. using ready made images, a WMS Server or a Server Url) and prepares them for upload and contribution to the Marble map servers. Really cool stuff!

Read all about it in Utku's blog!

Then there's Daniel Marth who worked on the new

• Overview map configuration dialog
• GPS / Position marker plugin configuration dialog
• And lots of other improvements that make Marble an even more polished jewel.

See Daniel Marth's wiki page for all the exciting details!

And then there have been lots of other changes by students like Cezar Mocan and Furkan Üzümcü. Thanks guys, you rock the Marble!

Now all of these changes are in a state which is basically ready for release. And even better: Most of the work is binary compatible. Even more important: Some of the features have a social aspect and allow users to easily participate in creation of maps and making Marble a better world to live in. So we want to bring these features to our users as quickly as possible!

That's why we plan for something special: We would like to release Marble 1.1 by the end of March! Marble 1.1 will be the first feature release that is entirely binary compatible with a prior major release! So combining the library of Marble 1.1 with KDE SC 4.6 will not be a problem. And Marble 1.1 will be the first feature release that doesn't come with a new major version of KDE. This will be a bit of a challenge but I think we can make it happen. The biggest challenge however will be getting translations and documentation prepared. We have created a marble-1.1 branch already and our aim is to keep strings between trunk and the marble-1.1 branch in sync. So our preliminary release schedule that we are aiming for looks like this:

• December 26, 2010: Creation of a marble-1.1 branch (has happened already)
• January 26, 2011: Release of KDE SC 4.6 with Marble 1.0.
• February 15, 2011: Soft message / feature freeze.
• February 28, 2011: Hard message / feature freeze
• March 1st, 2011: Marble 1.1 Beta 1.
• March 15, 2011: Marble 1.1 RC1.
• March 31, 2011: Marble 1.1 release for all platforms: Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Maemo / Nokia N900
• Summer 2011: Release of KDE SC 4.7 with Marble 1.2.

Again this development only affects the marble-1.1 branch. In parallel we'll work on Marble 1.2 which is scheduled to be released together with KDE SC 4.7 in Summer 2011. And again the biggest challenge will be to get Marble 1.1 translated!

Lots of helping hands were involved to develop the current version. Would you like to get involved? Please do!.

The Marble Sprint Weekend is about to start at the basysKom Office in Nuremberg. If you're around and if you're curious about development of the Marble Virtual Globe then don't hesitate to join us. This is your best chance to get involved! We'll have lots of interesting topics about Marble presented on Saturday. See our Marble Sprint Wiki for more information.

Marble 0.10.0 has been released as a major update last week together with KDE SC 4.5. As a user you might be interested in our Visual ChangeLog which is also available in spanish over at muylinux.com.